94 



SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



posal of baggage, etc., we drove the forty-odd miles to Los Banos, 

 and inspected the Baker house and collection, and by early afternoon 

 I was installed as a member of the household of Dr. Pendleton. 



During the long interval between the death of Dean Baker and my 

 arrival at Los Bafios, Dr. Pendleton had daily visited the home of 

 Baker, where the collection was housed, and had made frequent in- 

 spections of the walls, floors and partitions for termite injury. In 

 addition he kept in the service of the Baker estate two of Baker's 

 employees, Kurajigui, a Japanese handyman, and Fidel Agoba, a 

 Filipino collector. Under his orders these two faithful retainers had 

 maintained watchful guard over the house day and night, keeping 

 brazier fires during rainy and cloudy weather, replacing weakened 

 timbers when necessary, and in every way preserving the premises 

 and the collection in good condition against the arrival of the repre- 

 sentative of the National Museum to take over the responsibility. 



Baker's house was a modification of the native house with swali 

 (split bamboo matting) walls and corrugated iron roof instead of 

 the nipa thatch still commonly used by the natives. It stood on stilts 

 about eight feet above the ground, and was floored partly with split 

 bamboo lath. The windows were of a marine shell used almost uni- 

 versally in the better homes instead of glass, and the ceilings were of a 

 finer weave of swali. It was about 24 by 30 feet with a swali partition 

 down the middle and two cross partitions, dividing it into one room 

 occupying one-half of the floor space and three small rooms in the 

 other half, each of these small rooms opening into the main room or 

 sala but not connected with each other. His growing collection, library, 

 and card files had gradually encroached on the domestic arrangements 

 of his house until at the end these were limited to a rickety bamboo 

 bed at one end of the sala and an old-fashioned washstand in a 

 corner of one of the small rooms. At the rear was a bamboo porch 

 partly occupied by a storeroom for packing material, alcohol, kerosene, 

 etc. From one end of the porch an elevated passageway led diagonally 

 to a small house where lived Kurajigui and his wife, Ney San, and 

 where Baker ate the meals prepared for him by Ney San. 



In these surroundings, far less comfortable than those of many 

 of the natives who worked and studied under him at the college, and 

 much of the time in very bad health. Baker brought together the 

 greatest collection of Malayan insects ever assembled, occupying well 

 over 1,400 Schmitt Iwxes, collections of shells and fungi, and a cata- 

 logue of Homoptera estimated to comprise 100,000 cards all written 

 bv his own hand. In addition to this he carried on a correspondence 



